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ORNL Lifts the Lid on 1PF Jaguar

October 13, 2008 by

Oak Ridge National Lab was recently interviewed by the local Knoxville news. These local news interviews are not usually very interesting to those in HPC [no offense to KnoxNews], but they were permitted to film the machine installation! The *new* Jaguar supercomputer containing 150 cabinets of Cray compute is slated to break the 1PF mark. This would be the first machine utilizing commodity processors to do so.

We want to do the most productive supercomputing in the world to basically advance scientific discovery. Breakthrough science – that’s what it’s all about,” Thomas Zacharia, ORNL’s scientific computing leader, said in an interview last week.

ORNL will also begin installation of a second petaflop system, Kraken, shortly after the Jaguar acceptance. The second machine is courtesy a $65million grant from the NSF. Lots of changes around ORNL these days. On September 30th, they retired Phoenix, the Cray X1E vector machine.

For more info, pictures and video of the new Jaguar machine, read the full article here.

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